1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to systems and methods for building applications from compiled objects and, more particularly, to systems and methods for generating an installable installation repository for an application.
2. Background of the Invention
Building an installation image for an installation utility, such as IBM Installation Manager, typically requires dividing files into logical groups (artifacts) and creating metadata to describe the artifacts, referred to as installable units (IUs). Although integrated development environments (IDE) often provide utilities or user interfaces to define such groupings, these tools typically require installation developers to manually create the artifacts and corresponding metadata, such as IUs and one or more higher level groupings, such as sharable units (SUs), assemblies, and offerings.
However, it is unfeasible to manually divide, for example, 300,000 files into 30,000 artifacts in a large-scale build. Generating an artifact for each file results, in this example, in 300,000 metadata files (IUs) for each file, which would make the final installation repository prohibitively large. Dividing the files into a smaller set of artifacts results in very large artifacts. This presents difficulty when preparing fix packages inasmuch as artifacts are often replaced as a unit. Any modifications to a file included in the artifact would require the entire artifact to be regenerated, distributed, and installed. Where the artifacts are very large this becomes a very cumbersome and resource intensive task.
In view of the foregoing, what are needed are methods to facilitate artifact generation for applications including a large number of files and to otherwise facilitate creation of an installable application for consumption by an installation manager.